What is Free Web Hosting?
Web hosting is the service that allows you to store and display your web site on the internet. Some companies chose to offer this service free of charge and that effectively defines “free web hosting”. To offset the costs of offering hosting for free, these companies often place ads on free hosting member pages. The amount of ads can often be correlated with the quality and quantity of the services offered. Although many free web hosts have become slow (because you are often sharing a server with thousands of people!), there are still dozens of quality free hosts that can help you establish your online presence free of charge! That’s where this site comes in; We are here to help you find those free hosts that still offer a quality service. In fact, we rate all hosts on this site with a feature rating which takes into account load speed, ads on pages, and features offered in the package.
What is Bandwidth?
The amount of data that can be transferred in a fixed amount of time. This can be expressed in Gigabytes per month, or throughput amounts like Mbs. As a rule of thumb, 1mbs of bandwidth equates 300gb per month. Meaning, if you consitantly use 1mbs, you will wind up using 300gb of bandwidth (or sometimes known as transfer) per month. In terms of your web hosting account, everything from uploading files, to retrieving email, to actually getting hits on your website will use bandwidth.
What is Co-location?
This term means that you are co-locating or telehousing your servers with another company. This is a popular alternative to dedicated servers where you provide your own equipment and ship it to the data center. The benefits is that you pay one time for the equipment rather then paying the monthly lease charges associated with a dedicated server. Keep in mind that you will still need to pay for the space your server takes up in the data center and the bandwidth it uses.
What is a Data Center?
Some times referred to as the DC, this is the physical location (ie: building) where the servers are kept. The DC's usually have a fiber optic backbone connection (ie: OC48), redundant power delivery, temperature control and extreme security.
What is Dedicated Hosting?
This is a type of hosting where you own/rent an entire server. This means you have full (root) control of the server and don’t need to share it with anyone else. This becomes crucial for running big sites that require a lot of server resources.
What is a DDoS?
Distributed Denial of Service Attack. This is an attack where an attacker uses multiple machines to attack and over load your server. In a simpler single-machine attack it is refered to as a DOS (Denial of Service Attack).
What is an ISP?
An Internet Service Provider (ISP) is a company that provides internet access and other similar services to consumers. In the early days of the internet this category was very broad and included service providers like web hosts. These day's the term ISP usually refers to the telecoms bandwidth providers (like AT&T). This also includes companies that provide dial-up, ISDN, phone and cable internet services.
What is 95th Percentile?
This is a method used by some web hosts where they will only bill you for 95% of your bandwidth usage. The reasoning for this is that your top 5% are spikes that are not usually part of normal operations. This method is calculated by taking the average bandwidth used in 5min intervals and then taking only 95% of the usage for that 5minutes.
